ABSTRACT
For Romain Rolland the year 1933 was marked by a preoccupation with the Nazis. The Weimar Republic entered its final stage when von Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933. Urged by the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists to respond to the National Socialist takeover, Romain Rolland penned a sharp denunciation of Hitler's regime. Most non-Jewish antifascist intellectuals failed to situate anti-Semitism at the center of their perception of German fascist theory and practice. Romain Rolland aided antifascist refugees from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Antifascists had to decipher the hidden from the surface structure of fascism- to strip the ideology of its lies, expose its propaganda machinery, and lay bare its nationalistic, hierarchical, and racist reality. Most antifascist intellectuals concentrated their analytical skills exclusively on the Nazis. Antifascists had to defend the fortress of the Soviet Union for the sake of the Russians and for the real interests of progressive Western Europeans.
